The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign
Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2020

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Re-Open the Churches Now!

On Monday, June 15th, the provincial government of Manitoba announced that it was extending the state of emergency that we have been under since March for another thirty days. There had been no new cases of the bat flu from China reported that day. The total number of deaths from this virus in Manitoba remains at seven. There are, as of the afternoon of Friday June 19th, nine active cases in the province. Two hundred ninety-three people have recovered. Nobody is currently hospitalized here, let alone in the Intensive Care Unit, because of this disease. There is clearly no cause for extending the state of emergency. Its original justification, remember, was to prevent hospitals and ICUs from being swamped. This was always a dubious justification for suspending everyone's basic liberties and putting us under universal house arrest. Today, there is clearly no foundation for it whatsoever.

Friday the 19th also marked the fourteenth day after a radical Marxist anti-white, anti-cop hate group that many consider to be a terrorist organization, was allowed to host a rally on the grounds of the provincial legislature. The social distancing rules were not enforced at this rally which was reported to have been attended by a couple of thousand people. This rally was one of many that the same organization has been holding in cities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe since the death of George Floyd. Floyd, a repeat criminal offender with multiple convictions, died of a heart attack on May 25th. Although his death is being treated as a homicide he had overdosed on fentanyl. Fentanyl is a synthetic opiod, related to heroin but much more potent. A dosage of 3 milligrams is fatal and people have been known to die just from touching the stuff or catching a whiff of the fumes. Floyd had 11 nanograms per millilitre in his blood when he died and 5.6 ng/mL of norfentanyl, which is a metabolite of fentanyl. Nobody has yet survived having more than 4.6 ng/mL in his blood. He also had the SARS-CoV-2 virus and has the distinction of being the first person with this virus to have his death attributed to something else. This is because after purchasing a pack of cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, he was arrested as he was entering into a state of Excited Delirium due to the mixture of drugs - he also had methamphetamine, morphine and THC in his blood - in him. In this state he was uncooperative and the police restrained him using a nasty-looking but non-lethal knee hold as they called the paramedics. He had already begun uttering his famous last words "I can't breathe" before officer Chauvin's knee was upon him because he was already entering into the state of respiratory and heart failure that fentanyl overdoses produce. With the amount of drugs in him he would not have survived the day even if the storeowners had called social workers to come and let him talk about his feelings over tea and cookies rather than summoning the police. Nevertheless, thanks to a video of part of the police's encounter with Floyd that portrays the police in the worst possible light, which the mainstream media pounced upon because it supports their lying narrative about how blacks - who commit a much higher percentage of the murders and robberies in the United States every year than their percentage of the population - are unfairly picked on by the police, most people were convinced that a cop murdered Floyd. Black Lives Matter and their Antifa allies took advantage of the outrage thus generated by the media to organize these meetings that they call "rallies" and "protests" but which frequently break out into violent and highly destructive riots. In other words, not something that merits a special dispensation from following all the rules and restrictions that are still being imposed on everyone else.

The significance of the fourteen day marker is that this is the incubation period of the bat virus. This period did not produce a major spike in cases. Quite the contrary, on Friday it was announced that there was no evidence that the virus spread at all during the rally, which mercifully did not devolve into the burning of the city although it was as full of anti-white race hatred rhetoric as any other of these "protests." This eliminates anything that remains of the case for keeping the province in a state of emergency and not immediately lifting all restrictions.

By the way, the period since Floyd's death in which the media has been preoccupied with trying to stir up a race war and burn what remains of Western Civilization to the ground, saw any number of quietly underreported discoveries and admissions from public health organizations that this virus simply was not as dangerous as they were claiming in March.

I remarked weeks ago that the Churches would be the last that these drunk-with-power politicians and health bureaucrats, who consider abortions to be "essential" and have allowed marijuana shops to remain open throughout the lockdown, would allow to reopen. A petition has been started asking the Manitoba government to remove the restrictions on worship. Premier Brian Pallister, when asked about the petition, said that the Churches should "have a little faith."

I wonder if he realizes how blasphemous this is. It could be paraphrased "I want and expect and demand from you that which belongs to God alone."

He also said "We've liberalized our rules and deregulated faster than almost every jurisdiction in the country." In other words, we ought to be grateful that he is loosening tyrannical, totalitarian and draconian rules that should never have been imposed in the first place faster than the other provincial despots.

He also said:

The churches won't make health policy. Dr. Roussin and our health experts are making that health policy and they have good reason for being careful about the restrictions that are necessary to keep us all safe. I think it would be in the best interest for all of us to show respect for that and to make sure that we're, all of us, working together to protect our own health and the health of others.


Dr. Brent Roussin, whom I grew sick of seeing in the news every day as far back as March 21st, allowed thousands of people to gather for an anti-white hate rally two weeks ago, but will only allow Churches to open at 30% capacity as of Monday. That alone is sufficient evidence for me to conclude that he and his experts are incompetent at making health policy.


Brian Pallister and his chief public health officer clearly consider Churches to be less "essential" than doctors who murder unborn babies, stores that sell mind-destroying hemp by-products, and the purveyors of anti-white hate rhetoric. They have actually managed to out-Communist Pierre Trudeau. It was Pierre Trudeau who added the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to Canada's Constitution in 1982. The second section of the Charter identifies conscience, religion, and peaceful assembly among the "fundamental" freedoms of all Canadians. The above mentioned petition simply asks the government to respect those fundamental freedoms. If these freedoms are fundamental then Churches and other places of worship are essential. They ought to have been declared such at the beginning of the unnecessary lockdown, even though, as I argued at the time, the distinction between essential and non-essential is not the government's to make.

In the 365th line of his tenth Satire, Juvenal said "orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano." This means "pray for a sound mind in a healthy body" and alludes to an already extant saying that went back at least as far as Thales of Miletus. It is often used today to convey the message that physical health is important to psychological health, usually to promote exercise, nutrition and other wellness programs. It works the other way around, however, that psychological health is essential to physical health and this is how the ancients used the phrase as is evident in the larger context of Juvenal's poem. The ancients were also not as prone to compartmentalizing the psychological and the spiritual as we in this materialistic age are. Spiritual and psychological health go together and are essential to physical health.

In other words, open up the Churches. The longer they remain closed, the more mental and spiritual breakdowns will occur and manifest themselves in things like anti-white hate rallies, and that will be far worse for our physical health in the long run, than the bat flu from China.




Wednesday, June 17, 2020

The Convergence of Capitalism and Communism

In the eighteenth century, the harnessing of steam power, the rapid invention of labour-saving tools, and other related factors, came together in what historians call the Industrial Revolution, to give birth to the system of mechanized production in the modern factory. In the following century, this system and its theoretical advocacy in the writings of liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would both be dubbed capitalism by their critics. Those critics, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen and Karl Marx, argued that capitalism led to an increasing and unjust gap between the richest and the poorest. They blamed this on the private ownership of the factories and mines and other means of industrial production and proposed that this be replaced with some form of communal ownership. Their models for communal ownership vastly differed from one another, but the general proposal of replacing private with public ownership in a modern, industrialized, economy was given the name socialism. When overtly allied with the forces of revolutionary destruction that had been attacking the Crowns and Churches of Christendom since the Puritan rebellion of the 1640s, as was the case with Marxism, it was called communism.

Many people have the idea that capitalism and communism are polar opposites and the mortal foes of each other. This was the prevailing view during the Cold War in which both the United States and the Soviet Union pointed to their belief that their own system was the best as a motivating factor in the conflict. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism. So was the fact that the remaining large communist power, Red China, avoided a similar collapse and even thrived in the post-Cold War era, by incorporating elements of the market economy. Others, however, saw all of this in a different light. If China had incorporated elements of capitalism, most of the proposals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had made in The Communist Manifesto for moving a capitalist society towards communism had long ago been adopted by the Western powers, including the United States. Dr. Tomislav Sunic summed up the alternative interpretation of the end of the Cold War when he wrote “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” (Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, 2007, p. 34)

There were those who were prescient enough to see that capitalism and communism were heading towards a convergence rather than a conflict even before the Cold War began. In 1941, for example, James Burnham, who had resigned the previous year from the Trostkyite Socialist Workers Party, published a book entitled The Managerial Revolution, in which he maintained that capitalism was not a sustainable, permanent condition, nor was it likely to be replaced by socialism proper, but that it was undergoing a social revolution that would transform it into a managerial society, that is, a society governed by a new class of technocratic “managers.” Burnham further maintained that the same thing was going on around the world. The socialist countries were moving in the same direction as the capitalist countries. The new managerial class would include both corporate executives and state bureaucrats, with the distinction between the two becoming blurry even in nominally capitalist countries. Their cohesion as a class and their power would both be derived from their possession of the technical knowledge pertinent to the management of large corporate entities. George Orwell, who wrote a well-known critique of Burnham’s theory in 1945, also incorporated large elements of it into his dystopic novel 1984. The totalitarian system in the novel was widely interpreted as a depiction of the kind of society that existed in the Soviet Union at the time Orwell was writing, and to an extent this is true, although that better describes Animal Farm. In 1984 the totalitarian society is located in the then future of what was the capitalist world at the time of Orwell’s writing. It was one of three, more-or-less identical, superstates, governed by totalitarian managers. This was the future Burnham predicted, depicted in its most negative light.

Even before Burnham, however, Hilaire Belloc had predicted the convergence of capitalism and what he called collectivism, which was socialism or communism. Belloc, the son of a French father and an English mother, was a well-known writer of poetry, biography, history and social criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is most often remembered for his collaboration with G. K. Chesterton. Both men were devout, traditionalist, Roman Catholics, Belloc by upbringing and Chesterton by conversion, and together they promoted an alternative to capitalism that was called distributism. The gist of it was that capital property – the means of production – should be privately owned as in capitalism, but spread out among many private owners rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Like their social criticism in general, the idea drew heavily from the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum which spoke out for the rights of the working class, while attacking socialism and defending private property.

The most important book Belloc wrote articulating distributism was The Servile State, which was first published in 1912. In this book, he describes capitalism as an unsustainable system that had overthrown the more stable order of Medieval, feudal, Christendom and which was evolving, not into its collectivist rival, but into “the servile state.” The “servile state” would be a new order that would include aspects of both capitalism and collectivism, although in reality it would essentially be a new form of slavery. It would be a system in which the majority of the population would be proletarian wage slaves, providing the labour for the factories of the capitalists when needed, and maintained by the state when not. The only alternative to this future, Belloc argued, was distributism, because collectivism would merely lead to the same future by an alternate path.

Belloc’s book enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among post-World War II conservatives who saw in it a prediction of the welfare state that had been put in place to combat the Depression just prior to the war. This was not a wrong interpretation of the book, since many of the specifics Belloc gave of what he expected the servile state to look like do indeed match up with the programs of the welfare state. It might have been premature to declare the predictions of the book to be fulfilled already back then, however, when we consider what we are facing in 2020. Remember that Belloc saw the “servile state” as the destination of both capitalism and collectivism (socialism/communism) and as a form of societal servitude similar to slavery which sounds very much like what we call “totalitarianism” today.

Earlier this year, almost every government in the world, imposed measures upon their populations which mimicked the conditions that had existed in the Soviet Union when it was at its worst. They shut down the Churches, they closed all businesses that they deemed to be “non-essential”, forbade people to meet in groups larger than ten, five, or even in some jurisdictions, two, and imposed all sorts of other restrictions as well. They justified all of this by saying that it was necessary to fight the spread of a new virus and the harsh respiratory disease that it can produce. This justification was always nonsense. This writer was among those who recognized this right from the beginning. We knew all along that this virus is asymptomatic among a large number of those who contract it, that most of those who do experience symptoms experience mild to moderate flu like symptoms and require no hospitalization, and that the harsh form of pneumonia that it can produce is fatal mostly among people who are both very old and have multiple complicating health problems. What the situation called for, was a special effort to protect those most at risk, not an insanely draconian effort to protect everyone by imposing a universal quarantine. The governments that went to that extreme, did so on the recommendations of the World Health Organization that was itself passing on recommendations coming from the last communist superpower, which is the country where the pandemic originated, Red China. Based on recommendations that came ultimately from Red China, we recreated the totalitarian conditions of the Soviet Union. We began policing people more strictly over absurd statutes about how far apart they must be than over actual, mala in se, crimes. We treated our basic freedoms of assembly, association and religion as if they meant nothing in the face of disease and were merely privileges that belong to the state to bestow and withhold as it sees best.

What did the capitalist corporations do while all this was going on?

They jumped on board the totalitarian train, that’s what they did. Instead of telling the governments to shove their restrictions up their backsides and sending their high-payed corporate lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of these regulations in court, they complied with every rule and restriction, knowing that these would harm small businesses far more than it would them, and became active propagandists for the “new normal.” They encouraged the transition to a cashless market, long the favourite of totalitarians of every stripe. They stuck messages telling us to “stay home” on billboards and in their commercials. Companies whose business pertains to the flow of information, such as corporate media and the big tech companies, suppressed dissent to the lockdown and the spread of information that would support that dissent.
The capitalists supported the imposition of communism!

We are now in the midst of the second wave of communism, this year, and true to form, the second wave is proving to be worse than the first. There was almost universal outrage over what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. The anti-white, anti-cop, hate group, Black Lives Matter and the blackshirt thugs of Antifa took advantage of that fact to turn the incident into the casus belli for a race war. It began with the usual race riots of the sort that have been going on in the United States since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A protest in Minneapolis turned into a spree of vandalism, arson, looting, and violence, and the same sort of thing began happening in other cities around the United States, and then spread into Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Then they kicked it up a notch. Politicians, civil servants, police officers, and every white person in sight, were expected to genuflect before the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Everybody in the public spotlight, especially those in offices of civil authority, in was expected to acknowledge that their country was guilty, both in the past and now, of “systemic racism” against blacks. “Systemic racism” is a concept of Critical Race Theory, itself an expression of Cultural Marxism. There was the demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on the police leading up to the October Revolution.”


Then came the vandalism of statues and monuments – some of individuals who had owned slaves in the past, others of people who just happened to be prominent white historical figures, and even some ridiculously absurd cases people like Mahatma Gandhi – and the demand that all such monuments be removed and that streets and buildings named after these people be renamed. This attempt at erasing history, brings to mind the French Revolution, which similarly attempted to restart history afresh with “Year One.” The French Revolution, which itself took as its model Cromwell’s earlier rebellion in England, became the model for all subsequent communist revolutions. In Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over and declared it to be “Year Zero.” Read the history of the French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge while you are still able to do so. The former led to the “Reign of Terror” and the latter to the “Killing Fields.” This is not a pattern any sane group wishes to imitate.

Where are the corporate capitalists in this?

Again we find them, and again, especially the corporate media and the big tech companies, siding with the anti-white, race warriors. The corporate media has been telling everybody that the riots are just “peaceful protests” and that Black Lives Matter are just activists. They are also, of course, the ones who deliberately created the entire false narrative about institutional racism in the police force through their dishonest handling of the facts. Big tech has been suppressing dissent to this narrative, even more than it suppressed dissent to the COVID-19 narrative.

Capitalism and communism have converged into one, with the traits of the latter being the dominant ones.

Hilaire Belloc would not have been surprised.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

A History Lesson

The white European powers of the colonial era did not invent slavery. They did not even invent black slavery. Until quite recently in human history slavery existed on every continent on earth, except Antarctica. Indians enslaved other Indians in the Americas before the arrival of the white man. African tribes were enslaving their captives of war – other Africans – and selling them to the Arabs and the Chinese as far back as the Tang dynasty, which was long before the Portuguese became the first Europeans to get involved in the African slave trade. Asians had been enslaved by other Asians throughout history, and Europeans by other Europeans at various points in their history.

It was Europe’s getting involved in the African slave trade that led ultimately to that system’s demise. When the European powers began purchasing slaves from African slave traders, the age of exploration was beginning, and along with it the settling of colonies in the New World. Slavery flourished for a period that, from a historical point of view, was quite brief, before reformers, some motivated by Christianity, others by the emerging liberalism of the Modern Age, demanded its abolition. Early in the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom took up that cause. She abolished the slave trade throughout her empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833. In Canada, we were a bit ahead of the rest of the Empire in this. Upper Canada – now called Ontario – banned the importation of slaves, and began the gradual emancipation of the few that were here, in 1793.

These Acts did not abolish slavery in the United States for the obvious reason that the Americans had seceded from the British Empire in their Revolution in the 1770s. Nevertheless, they led to the abolitionist movement gaining strength in the United States since the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, which abolition the Empire was backing up with naval force, cut the American slave trade off from its supply.

In the 1860s the Americans went to war with each other. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in the fall of 1860 without any electoral seats from the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In ten of those states he had received no votes whatsoever, and he won only two out of almost a thousand counties. The United States was divided and polarized, and this would not be the last time, but here the divide coincided with a regional division on the map. Slavery was only one of the issues that divided the North and the South, nor was it the main issue. The conflict was primarily one between a modernizing, increasingly urban, society, with a secularized Puritan culture, intend on building an economy based on industrial manufacture on the one hand and a more traditional, rural society that was more conservative in its religion and wished to retain an agricultural way of life on the other. When Lincoln was elected without any support from the latter, the Southern states opted to secede and form the Confederate States of America. They believed they were within their constitutional rights to do so and while this was a hot topic at the time, this was certainly in keeping with the Jeffersonian or anti-federalist interpretation of the American constitution.

Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery, but this was not what motivated his actions. In his first Inaugural Address, he promised to drop the issue if the Southern states would return. To keep the South in the United States he ordered an invasion of the South, leading to a war that cost more American lives that the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, and the Korean War combined. The campaign was fought according to the pattern that is now called “total war”, laying waste to the Southern countryside. Waging such a war against people who by your own theory are still your brethren and countrymen was and is considered atrocious and required an iron-clad moral justification. Modernizing the economy simply would not cut it. It is for this reason that the Northern interpretation of these events has always placed the stress on the abolition of slavery, often to the exclusion of all other causes of the war.

It should be noted that another man at the time who condemned slavery as a “moral and political evil” was Robert E. Lee, the brilliant general to whom Lincoln had first offered the command of the Union forces. He turned it down and resigned his commission rather than draw his sword against his native state of Virginia. Lee, even though he thought secession was a foolish idea, offered his services to Virginia and was given charge over the Army of Northern Virginia. By the end of the war he had gone from being the de facto to being the official, supreme commander of the Southern forces.

The reason this ought to be noted is because events like those of the 1860s could very well have increased, rather than decreased, the animosity between the two regions of the United States, and to prevent this from happening the Americans eventually settled on a compromise. Just as Homer eulogized Hector as well as Achilles in The Iliad, so the heroes on both sides would be honoured. This helped cement their country back together, and the United States gained from it for by all accounts the most honourable leaders in the conflict were men like the aforementioned General Lee and his associate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The agreement to honour both sides was an honest effort to heal a wound, repair a division, and unite a country, and for a century it was successful.

The exact opposite is true of what the Black Lives Matter movement is currently doing.

While Black Lives Matter and Antifa, if it is indeed right to think of the two as separate entities, claim to hate racism, it is really white people they hate. If they really hated racism, their goal would be for blacks and whites to get along, for there to be racial peace and harmony. Instead, they have been fomenting racial strife and division. Or they would be, if whites still had self-respect, or at the very least the instinct for self-preservation, enough to stand up for themselves. Since that does not appear to be the case, what we are seeing instead is a form of one-sided violence, a bullying or beating-up on whites.

The “anti-racist” left has for some time now been trying to undo the aforementioned post-bellum healing of the American nation by demanding the removal of Confederate flags, statues of Lee, Jackson, and other Southern military heroes, and that streets, buildings and cities named after these men be renamed. Three years ago, they turned up to counter-protest what would, unlike the Black Lives Matter riots that are mislabeled such by the mainstream media, otherwise have truly been a “peaceful protest” against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, and turned it into a violent brouhaha that led to the deaths of three people, the blame for which, predictably, was placed entirely on those who objected to the removal of the statue, although it was the other side that started the violence. They are now capitalizing on the outrage over George Floyd’s death to demand and obtain the removal of these Confederate monuments.

They are not stopping with the Confederate monuments, however, as those of us who have all along opposed the attack on those monuments knew they would not. Patrick Buchanan asks in his latest column whether George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and basically everybody who built the United States, will be next. It is a rhetorical question, I am sure. He knows the answer as well as I do.

In London, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been defaced, and the British government has ordered it boarded up to protect it against further vandalism. This was, of course, the same Sir Winston Churchill who led the free world in the war against the German dictator whose name has become virtually synonymous with white racism. In Leeds, a statue of Queen Victoria has been similarly defaced. Queen Victoria reigned over a British Empire in which slavery had been abolished. The bill accomplishing that had been signed into law by her father William IV, four years prior to her accession. Her government took great lengths to make sure that bill was enforced.

Here in the Dominion of Canada, Black Lives Matter has been demanding the removal of the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal. Their charge against the leading Father of Confederation and our country’s first Prime Minister is that he started the Indian Residential Schools. The rebuttal to this, not that facts matter to these pathetic know-nothings, is that the Churches had started the residential schools on their own prior to Confederation, Sir John A. MacDonald began funding the schools to fulfil the Dominion’s obligation under the treaties to provide the Indians with education, that the abuses which have given these schools a bad name come from the anecdotal evidence collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which pertains to a period long after Sir John A. Macdonald’s premiership, and that these schools, whose language immersion policies were by no means uniform, no more practiced “cultural genocide” than French immersion schools do today.

It is absurd to judge the leaders of a hundred or more years ago, by standards which we have invented in our own day, as if we, who are living in what is probably the greatest age of moral depravity since the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah, have any right to establish such standards. This is especially true, when the standards pertain to racism, and we are hypocritically demanding from the white leaders of the past, a perfect adherence to standards which the non-whites of the present day are never expected to keep.

The demands and actions of the Black Lives Matter mob are leading us down a path to greater racial violence, not to racial peace and harmony. But then, mobs always lead to violence rather than peace and harmony. Either the promoters of this nonsense know that and it is their intention, or they have never learned from the history they seek to erase.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Do Black Lives Really Matter to Black Lives Matter?

Does the Black Lives Matter movement really believe what is asserted in its own name?

That this is highly questionable has been pointed out on the grounds that if the movement really believed that black lives matter, it would not be wasting all of its time protesting the miniscule fraction of black deaths that are caused each year by white policemen and instead would be protesting the intraracial violent crime in the black community that is responsible for a much larger percentage of black deaths and would undoubtedly be responsible for many more were it not for the very police they hate so much.

Today, I would like to approach this question from a different angle – that of the Black Lives Matter movement’s position on abortion.

Although it is a single issue movement dedicated to fighting what it perceives as - or, more accurately, labels as systemic or institutional racism against blacks, particularly on the part of the police, it does seem to have a position on abortion. It is in favour of it. To be more precise, it supports and demands what it calls “reproductive justice.” This, of course, is just an absurd euphemism for abortion. It in turn is supported by pro-abortion groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Anyone familiar with the founder of the latter group, Margaret Sanger, her views on eugenics, and who all she worked with to promote those views, will find this deliciously ironic.

Black Lives Matter is not the first anti-racist group to support abortion. Years ago I noticed that Anti-Racist Action, a gang of punks similar to the skinheads but with an anarcho-Marxist ideology and Communist backers that was a forerunner to what is now called Antifa, gave support for abortion rights a prominent mention in its manifesto, which was not a long document.

That single-cause leftist groups would support other leftist causes than their own is not particularly surprising. Indeed, the concept of “intersectionality”, that was originally thought up by the non-white wing of third-wave feminism but which has since become the dominant interpretive grid in progressive theory in general, would be reason to expect that such would be the case. The gist of the concept is that someone who on the ever growing list of “victim of discrimination” categories can check off more than one box, might be the victim of discrimination not on the basis of any of these alone, but several or all of them in combination. While it is clearly a crackpot notion thought up to justify the ongoing existence and mission creep of the anti-discrimination industry long after any complaints that rational people might have thought had merit had been redressed, it has proven very useful to the left in the coordination of causes that taken on their own might be considered incompatible with one another.

What we are seeing here is an example of this. Ever since its second-wave – the wave that began in the 1950s and 1960s with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the founding of NOW and NARAL – feminism has held it to be one of its fundamental tenets that not to give women the special right to murder their children while the latter are still unborn is to discriminate against women. The anti-racist movement of today, of which Black Lives Matter is a part, is the successor to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Its raison d'être is to fight what it considers to be discrimination in favour of whites and against non-whites, even though it has been the case for decades that the only real institutional racial discrimination in Western countries now runs in the opposite direction. Both movements are crazy in their own right, and since both define themselves in opposition to something they irrationally and falsely perceive to be discrimination, intersectionality brings them together.

There is a major contradiction in the linking of these causes, however. I am not referring, although it is interesting to point it out, to how the more radical wing of second-wave feminism grew out of what was essentially the women’s auxiliary of the Civil Rights Movement when it objected to being treated as the kitchen staff by the male leadership of the latter movement (see Susan Brownmiller’s history In Our Time) or to how the same elements of American black culture that frequently use aggressive and hateful anti-white language also express themselves in violent misogynistic language. I am referring to the fact that blacks have the highest abortion rate in the United States.

William Robert Johnston has compiled all the available statistics on abortion by race in the United States from the years 1965 to 2017
. His first two graphs and the accompanying table show the number of live births per year for each race and the number of abortions per year for each race. The third graph shows the abortion percentage. This is the number of abortions considered as a percentage of the live births and abortions taken together. From the mid-1970s until late in the first decade of this millennium, this percentage was between 40 and 45. For the same period the percentage for all races taken together was between 20 and 30. For whites in this period it was between 15 and about 27.5. The next graph shows the white percentage of total abortions declining from 1965 to 2015 and the black percentage of total abortions rising in the same period. Interestingly, the graph after that shows the white percentage of total live births undergoing a similar decline, whereas the black percentage of total live births remains pretty constant.

The point, if it is not by now obvious, is that unborn black lives are far more likely to be aborted than the unborn lives of other races.

If Black Lives Matter really thinks that black lives matter why, then, does it support abortion?

The fact that it does support abortion demonstrates that black lives obviously matter more to all those anti-abortion, right-wingers, whom they routinely accuse of “white supremacism” than they do to Black Lives Matter. Come to think of it, we right-wingers are also the ones who support the police against the black criminals who prey on other blacks rather than the other way around.

It seems to me like some people are marching under a banner that ill suits them.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Defund the Left!

Last month I made the suggestion that we disarm the police. This was a proposal for a sort of “reverse gun control” and was the third in a series of four essays written in response to the way the Prime Minister had shamelessly capitalized on the suffering of the families of the victims of the Nova Scotia shooter to ban the sale and ownership of a large number of rifles based solely on their outward appearance. The police in Lethbridge, Alberta had made fools of themselves on May 4th by drawing their guns on a girl dressed up for “Star Wars Day” and carrying a toy gun as a prop. Since the police have been the biggest supporters outside the political left, of the excessive and unnecessary firearms restrictions that the evil Liberal Party of Canada loves to impose, primarily on Canadians in the prairies and other rural areas, I figured they deserved to have the tables turned on them.

Some people thought the proposal to be a rather radical one. It was not, though. Not really. Radical, despite its derivation from the Latin word for “root”, is generally used to indicate that something is a major break away from what is customary and traditional towards what is novel and unprecedented. My proposal would bring the policing aspect of the Canadian branch of the great tree that is the British Commonwealth tradition back in line with the trunk. Police in England do not traditionally carry firearms. My proposal, therefore, could only be called radical in the archaic sense of “having roots” which is seldom if ever used today.

By contrast, the anti-white, anti-police, hate movement known as Black Lives Matter has come up with a proposal that is truly radical in the modern and contemporary sense of the term. “Defund the police” and even “abolish the police” are the slogans at the forefront of their most recent round of protests and riots. To defund or abolish the police is to defund or abolish law and order since the police are by definition those whose office it is to enforce the law and maintain order. To call for the abolition of the police is to call for chaos. It is appropriate, in a dark and twisted sort of way, that the thugs and crooks and hooligans and other low-life scum who are smashing windows, looting stores, burning down buildings, and tearing down monuments, would be in favour of something that amounts to chaos. It is difficult to understand why anybody else would treat it as a serious proposal.

Black Lives Matter claims that the institution of the police is deeply embedded with racism towards blacks in the United States and towards Indians in Canada. The evidence does not bear this out, but the news media has been distorting the facts to make the same claim for so long, that most people believe it. The supposed racism of the police is the basis for the movement’s call to defund or abolish them. To protect blacks from the police, the police need either to be abolished or to have most of their funding transferred to social programs of various sorts.

Now that we have seen what stupid people do in lieu of thinking let us look at what someone who knows what he is talking about has to say on this matter.

David Clarke Jr., was sheriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin from 2002 to 2017, and a career law enforcement officer long before that. He is himself black. His take on defunding or abolishing the police is very different from that of the Black Lives Matter thugs.

In an interview with WorldNewsDaily earlier this week, Clarke said:

The biggest losers in all this will be poor black people in crime-ridden ghettos. The police are the only thing standing between them and violent criminal predators.

Clarke is, of course, right about this. Poor black neighborhoods, especially in large cities, have been afflicted with much more crime, especially robbery and homicide, than other neighborhoods for decades now. This, and not “police racism”, is the reason they are arrested and on the receiving end of police violence in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population. This is not a case of black neighborhoods being invaded by white criminals. It is overwhelmingly black-on-black crime. When police use force against black criminals it is primarily black victims whom they are protecting.

Clarke, therefore, was also right when he went on to say of the “defund the police” proposal:

You'd have to loathe black people to do that to them.

What Clarke has pointed out here is a particular example of a general observation that has been around for a long time - revolutions usually make things much worse rather than better for those in whose name they are carried out. The saying “a revolution eats its own children” goes back to the French Revolution when it aptly described the way the factions of the Jacobin Club, after sending the king, queen, aristocrats, and prelates to the guillotine, began turning on each other and denouncing each other as “enemies of the people” or “enemies of the Revolution”, until eventually even Robespierre himself, literally lost his head. The masses, however, fared even worse than the revolutionary leaders. The most general form of this observation goes back to Aristotle in his Politics, 2, 370 years ago. It was because revolutions so consistently made things worse rather than better, Aristotle argued, that the better constitutions are marked by their security and stability, and the best constitution would be the most secure and stable of them all.

Who in their right mind thinks that black people in the United States or Indians in Canada would be better off rather than worse of if there were nobody to investigate when one of them turns up having been murdered? Or that they would be better off rather than worse if there were nobody to call if their house or store were broken into?

Since they are the mostly likely to be victims of these and other serious crimes, somebody would have to be completely off his rocker to think they would be better off without the police. Liberals and progressives have been jumping on the “defund the police” bandwagon, but that is merely the same point worded another way.

There are a lot of reforms than can and should be made to law enforcement. This is not one of them.

A short time ago – it was just last month – the same people who are now calling the police racists and demanding that they be defunded and abolished, were insisting that they be given more power to go around ticketing people and imposing exorbitant fines for ordinary, everyday, non-criminal behaviour, such as shaking hands, going to church, or going for a walk in the park.

Never before has the late Sam Francis’s concept of “anarcho-tyranny” – a synthesis of anarchy and tyranny in which the ordinary protection of the rule of law is withdrawn (anarchy) and unjust, arbitrary, and oppressive rules are imposed (tyranny) – been more applicable. It is precisely what the left has been demanding.

Who do we talk to about defunding the left?

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Apocalypses 2020

Years from now, provided there is anyone left to write the history, the year 2020 AD might very well be dubbed “The Year of the Apocalypses.” That is not a typo, the plural is deliberate.

A mere three months ago, in a period that already seems to have been wiped from living memory by the death of George Floyd, we were told by the mainstream mass media that we were living out the reality of Stephen King’s The Stand. A superflu was spreading around the globe like wildfire, threatening all life in its path. We would either die a horrible death from an asphyxiating pneumonia that causes excruciating pain, or, more likely, would experience ordinary flu symptoms, or, just as likely, no symptoms whatsoever. In the name of saving us all from this fate, our governments suspended our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion, told most people other than those involved in the production and distribution of food and medicine that their jobs and businesses were “non-essential”, and ordered everybody to stay home and to stay at least six feet away from each other at all times. It looked very much like our governments had decided that to avoid living out The Stand we needed to live out George Orwell’s 1984 instead, and learn to love Big Brother.

We have now moved from The Stand into The Camp of the Saints. In this novel by Jean Raspail which first appeared in French in 1973, white, Christian, Western Civilization is brought to an end by its own liberalism. First, the liberalism which permeates France from the top to the bottom, prevents her from doing what is necessary to preserve her own existence when threatened by the invasion of an armada of decrepit ships laden with the teeming, impoverished, masses of the Third Word. France’s president knows what must be done to save France, but is unwilling to say it publicly. The overwhelming message, expressed in mindless and banal slogans, from the political and cultural leadership of the country is that the migrants must be welcomed and embraced. This part of the story occupies the largest part of the novel. After France’s refusal to turn away the migrants lays bare the weakness of the West for all to see, anti-racist uprisings occur in every major Western city with the West’s own, progressive and liberal corporate, governmental, ecclesiastical, and media elites defecting to the side of the revolutionaries.

Five years ago I wrote about how the migrant – or “Syrian refugee” as the media falsely labelled it – crisis in Europe, was like watching the first part of Raspail’s story come true. Today, what we are seeing looks more like the second part of the story. The Black Lives Matter movement has capitalized on George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis police to organize events in every major city in not just the United States, but in Canada and throughout the Western world. Called “peaceful protests” by an adoring and sympathetic mainstream media, they are more accurately described as riots, being all too frequently, and hardly coincidentally, accompanied by mass looting, vandalism, arson, and violence. In all of this they are no different from previous race riots, such as those of the “long hot summer” of 1967. This time, however, they have the endorsement, not just of empty-headed celebrities, but of major corporations and religious and political leaders as well. Indeed, with all the monument and statue toppling that has being going on, “insurrection” would be a better word than even “riot.” It is very much starting to resemble the global racial insurrection in The Camp of the Saints.

Earlier this year, when the previous Apocalypse was underway, many of us noted that the way the politicians, the media, and the World Health Organization were talking about keeping the lockdown in place until a vaccine was developed and then making that vaccine mandatory, was sounding suspiciously like the passage in the thirteenth chapter of the actual Apocalypse of St. John in the New Testament that speaks of the Mark of the Beast. This was even before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the United States House of Representatives devised a bill authorizing the American Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend $100 billion in programs for “Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone” with regards to the coronavirus and gave it the number HR6666. I made a few jokes about Bill Gates, a major funder of vaccine development and who was talking last year about implanted vaccination records, acting like he were auditioning for the role of Antichrist, but I promptly regretted it when a friend tried to turn it into a tiresome and tedious discussion of the fine and minute points of eschatology and what has to happen before what in the unfolding of the last of the last days.

Now it seems that another contender for the infamous Mark has appeared on the scene. In these anti-white racist rallies, the representatives of civil authority such as politicians and policemen, have been expected to participate in a ceremony that is usually called “taking the knee.” It began in the world of athletics four years ago when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49s, knelt during the pre-game playing of the American national anthem as a protest against what he erroneously believed to be the state of affairs in his country with regards to police racism. It is obvious from the way it is being used in the rallies today that is has developed into something far beyond what it was in its original context. It is demanded as a sign of submission and contrition – albeit with no absolution proffered.

It is noteworthy that this ritual abasement involves a gesture that is virtually identical to what is called genuflection in Christianity – the bending of one knee and touching the ground with the other. The significance of genuflection in Christianity is as a sign of respect and reverence in acknowledgement of the presence of God. It was originally derived from the recognition of God as the King of Kings. One would bend one knee when called into the presence of his earthly liege lord and Sovereign. The Church, in recognition of God as the Highest of Kings, reserved the other knee for the acknowledgement of His presence. In the Roman Communion, and the higher of the Churches of the Anglican Communion, it is customary to genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in both the Nicene Creed and in the reading of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, in acknowledgement of the fact that God had come down from His throne in Heaven to dwell among men as one of us. Other genuflections, such as those made by the celebrant during the consecration of the elements of the Eucharist, and by the congregants upon entering and exiting the building or their pew, are in acknowledgement of Christ’s Sacramental Presence.

The practice is not universal among Christians among whom there are many theological disagreements with regards to Christ’s Sacramental Presence. When a violent and totalitarian movement, however, starts demanding that people demonstrate their submission by making to it a sign of respect that has traditionally been reserved for the presence of Christ, all the faithful should recognize that it is the Enemy of their souls who so demands their submission and allegiance.

Whether or not this is “the” final, Mark of the Beast, of prophecy, I have no idea. The way things have been going we are likely to get two or three more Apocalypses in before the end of the year. Either way, our duty is plain and that is not to submit.

Those who take the knee, do so at the peril of their own souls.

Saturday, June 6, 2020

The Irrationality of Anti-Racism

It is amusingly ironic that in the taxonomy of modern thought, racism is considered to be a species belonging to the genus prejudice. The word prejudice refers to certain types of non-rational beliefs or ideas. Note that I said non rational not irrational. Something can be non-rational without being irrational. Something that is irrational is contrary to logic or reason. Something that is non rational is not derived from logic or reason but is not necessarily contrary to logic or reason. Prejudice, a word formed from components that mean “before” and “judgement”, denotes beliefs or ideas that have been formed before the process of making a reason based judgement. It has both a positive and a negative sense, although the former is all but forgotten in our day and age. Prejudice in the positive sense refers to the ideas that have been passed on to us through tradition that enable us to make decisions in the absence of the information necessary to form a fully rational judgment. Edmund Burke praised prejudice in this sense of the word at great length in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the other sense of the term, prejudice is a negative opinion formed against a person or group without sufficient evidence to support it. Both forms of prejudice are non-rational, neither is necessarily irrational, but the latter kind of prejudice is frowned upon because it involves unjustified injury to the reputation of a person or group. Racism is considered to fall under the category of the second kind of prejudice. This brings us back to our initial statement. The irony is due to the fact that anti-racism, in the sense of the set of beliefs that expresses itself in organized activism against racism, is not just non-rational but thoroughly irrational.

As evidence of this claim, I offer the anti-racist response to the words "All lives matter".

This expression is obviously itself a response to "Black lives matter", a phrase which began as a Twitter hashtag seven years ago when George Zuckerman was acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and which became the name of an organized activist movement. For the sake of distinguishing between the phrase qua phrase and the movement it has been attached to, quotation marks will be used when the phrase is intended and the capitalization of the initial letter of each word will indicate that the movement is intended. Note carefully the nature of the response. “All lives matter” does not contradict what is stated by “Black lives matter.” Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, it clearly affirms it. Black lives are part of the extension of all lives, therefore if all lives matter, black lives matter. Furthermore, “All lives matter” is more inclusive than “Black lives matter.” In anti-racist theory and rhetoric “inclusivity” is ordinarily considered to be good, desirable and ideal, while its opposite “exclusivity” is treated as being bad and undesirable. Indeed, one of the principle objections to racism is that it excludes people. A stereotypically racist club, for example, is one that excludes people from membership on the basis of their skin colour.

Anti-racists, however, regard “All lives matter” as being a racist slogan, take offense whenever they hear it, and demand that people stop using it.

Let us look at a couple of examples from this past week alone.

Grant Napear, long-time play-by-play television announcer for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, as well as the host of a show on Sacramento’s KHTK Sports 1140 radio station, was fired from the latter and made to resign from the former, because of a tweet including the slogan “All lives matter.”

Here in Manitoba, our provincial premier Brian Pallister, speaking on Tuesday about the anti-racism protest that was scheduled to take place on Friday and in support of that protest said “Black lives matter, All lives matter, of course” and was immediately attacked for doing so. Someone named Elsa Kaka, who apparently hosts a podcast entitled “The Ordinary Black Girl Podcast” gave an interview to the press in which she said “'All lives matter' is a deeply offensive and problematic phrase that has been used to derail and disregard the Black Lives Matter movement.” Pallister, much to my disgust, apologized on Wednesday.

How could "All lives matter" possibly be "deeply offensive and problematic" to anyone except those who hold and cherish the belief that some lives don't matter?

The rational answer is that it cannot. The late Sir Roger Scruton frequently talked about the distinction between "giving offence" and "taking offence" and here we have a textbook example. The phrase "All lives matter" does not give offence in what it affirms, those who object to it are taking offence.

The offence they take from the slogan has nothing to do with the meaning of the words themselves. Indeed, any attempt to find fault with the assertion made by those words would immediately render them susceptible to the charge that they think some lives don't matter. Their justification for taking offence, when they deign to give such a justification rather than simply assuming that their taking offence is itself its own sufficient justification, is to either rely upon the ad hominem argument that the slogan is racist because those who say it are racist, object to the intention of the words, i.e., to counter the "Black lives matter" slogan and criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, or argue that "All lives matter" detracts from their own message which is that the institutions and structure of American, and by extension all Western, societies are embedded with a racism that treats black lives as if they don't matter.

The first of these arguments merits no response.

The problem with the objection to the intent of the words is that it requires the assumption that the Black Lives Matter movement is or ought to be beyond criticism. This assumption is both false and dangerous. No movement, let alone one the "peaceful demonstrations" of which have a tendency to become violent or degenerate into riots, ought to be beyond criticism.

The final argument rests upon a belief that is widely held even though it is demonstrably wrong.

Let us consider the specific type of alleged institutional racism which has been the primary focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. Police in the United States, especially white police, are accused of being racist towards blacks and expressing that racism by making blacks more than anyone else the objects of the violent abuse of their authority.

The facts simply do not bear this out. In 2017 American police killed 457 whites and 223 blacks, in 2018 they killed 399 whites and 209 blacks, in 2019 they killed 370 whites and 235 blacks, and in this year so far they have killed 172 whites and 88 blacks. Now, the fact that the total number of whites killed each year exceeds the total number of blacks is not sufficient to disprove the allegation. It is to be expected because there are more whites than blacks in the United States. In 2017, for example, there were 247.62 million whites in the United States and 43.5 million blacks. Now here is where the argument for police racism comes in. There were 5.69 times the number of whites than blacks in the United States in 2017. By contrast the number of whites killed by police was only twice as high. This, the anti-racists maintain, proves that police are racist. If they weren't, the number of whites killed by the police would be around 5-6 times higher than blacks so killed. However, there is another figure which must be taken into consideration. In the same year out of reported non-fatal violent crimes, 2, 230, 910 involved white perpetrators and 1, 112, 610 involved black perpetrators according to the American Bureau of Justice Statistic’s National Crime Victimization Survey. In other words, the number of whites who committed non-fatal violent crimes was only twice the number of blacks, the exact same ratio as is found among white and black victims of police killings, and equally disproportionate to the relative size of the two racial populations. Since the vast majority of cases where police kill a suspect involve violent crimes - the recent example of George Floyd being an obvious exception as it involved passing a bad bill - it is far more rational, if far less politically correct, to attribute the disproportion in the percentage of blacks among victims of police violence to their identical overrepresentation among violent crime offenders than to racial prejudice on the part of the police. Since this holds true for pretty much any year for which these statistics are available, and studies have repeatedly shown that policemen of every race are far more likely to shoot a member of their own race than of the other, just as criminals of all races are far more likely to choose victims of their own race than of another, this conclusion is quite definite. Arguments which take the form of "but look at what happened to fill-in-the-blank" are not valid as a rebuttal. Ironically, they involve an extrapolation from the specific to the general that is very similar to the sort that anti-racists would immediately recognize as invalid in the case of racial stereotypes.

Clearly, the anti-racist condemnation of "All lives matter" is utterly irrational. This is only to be expected. After all, we are talking about a belief system/movement that fifty-six years after an American Congress that was by a vast majority white passed a bill protecting blacks against the private discrimination of employers, landlords, etc., sixty-three years after a white American president used military force to racially integrate a high school in Arkansas, forcing it to comply with the ruling of an all-white Supreme Court three years earlier that all segregation laws were unconstitutional, and one-hundred fifty-five years after an all-white American Congress abolished black slavery, maintains that institutional white racism is the biggest problem in the United States. Furthermore, it is a belief system the representatives of which frequently claim that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, which very much suggests that it is itself an example of the very thing it ostensibly opposes. The assertion that there is an evil demanding extirpation, of which all whites and only whites are guilty, cannot be anything other than racism against white people - frequently on the part of white people. It is thoroughly and utterly irrational

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Race Riots: One More American Import We Don’t Need

I have, for as long as I can remember, been an opponent of the Americanization of Canada. This will probably not come as a surprise to long-time readers, although it might shock those who think of the Canadian way as being progressive, liberal, and left-wing and the American way as being reactionary, conservative and right-wing. When one takes the historical point of view, however, and remembers that all three of the latter set of terms originally referred to people who supported the institution of royal monarchy and the establishment of a Church governed by bishops in direct succession from the Apostles, it is quite apparent that they are misapplied in reference to the secular, republic of the United States of America. It is less difficult to argue against the claim that the Canada of the present day is progressive, liberal, and left-wing, but to the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Americanization of Canada. The Liberal Party was historically the party of Americanization. This was most obvious in 1891, 1911, and throughout the entire period when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister. (1)


I oppose the Americanization of Canada politically, on the grounds that the Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy is superior to any form of republicanism and that innovations introduced from the American republican system have never improved things here but only made them worse. I oppose the Americanization of Canada religiously - while I would prefer that the mainstream Christian Churches in Canada were far more orthodox and far less liberal than they are, I do not think the solution is more of the mixture of Puritanism, direct-personal-revelation-from-God-through-experience enthusiasm (2), and fanatical Millennialism that tends to characterize American folk Christianity. We have quite enough of our own domestic version of that sort of thing. I oppose the Americanization of Canada culturally. Probably nothing originating below the 49th Parallel has been more erosive and corrosive of Canada's traditions, institutions, culture, morality, and religion than what has been imported from the motion picture studios of Hollywood, California, and the recording studios of greater Los Angeles. To be fair, this is also what has been eroding and corroding the United States' own traditions, institutions, etc.



It is greatly to my disgust, therefore, to see signs that the American custom of the race riot is starting to move northward. We have enough trouble with our own, closest domestic equivalent, to worry about. Periodically Indians illegally blockade roads and railroads until the cowardly and craven politicians in Ottawa throw enough of the taxpayers' money at them and make enough absurd and meaningless gestures in response to whatever demands, reasonable or unreasonable, they are making. Nowadays, as the railroad blockade earlier this year demonstrates, professional agitators on the payroll of American petroleum interests can get away with this by claiming to be Indians, even if this claim has about the same level of validity as Elizabeth Warren's. We certainly do not need what is going on south of the border happening up here.


Once again the inner-cities of major American metropoles are burning. The race riot is an American tradition that is usually traced back to the Harlem riot of 1935. I am going to pass over this and the Harlem riot of 1943 due to their being isolated incidents, however celebrated, and date the tradition to the Harlem riot of 1964, since it was demonstrably the first in a chain. The riot, which started in response to a police officer’s having shot down a black teenager named James Powell, ran for almost a week. It began on July 16th. This was two weeks to the day after the Civil Rights Act came into effect.


The significance of that timing cannot be stressed enough. Ten years previously, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that de jure segregation was unconstitutional in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The American President at the time, liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower, declared that this decision would be backed up by force if necessary and three years later, when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas he demonstrated that he meant it. Progressive liberals, to distract public attention from the fact that the institutional white racism, which even then they were blaming for all the evils of the world, had been dealt a death blow in a top down move by an all-white Supreme Court (3) backed by a white President, had the new mass media of communications technology shine its spotlight on a bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama led by a local Baptist minister about a year and a half after Brown v. Board, to create the illusion of a grass-roots, protest movement, headed by a saintly preacher of non-violent resistance, that would slay the dragon of segregation. In reality the movement was fighting a mortally wounded segregation in its death throes. Its crowning achievement was the aforementioned Civil Rights Act which laid the foundation for the crazy busing schemes of de jure integration, Affirmative Action and its quotas, anti-discrimination litigation and the shakedown industry in general. Two weeks after it had come into effect, the first race riot began. Let that forever shut the mouths of those who try to justify riots of this sort on the grounds that “it’s the only way they can make themselves heard.” That is and always has been utter tripe.


Ten days after the Harlem riot broke out in July of 1964, another one started in Rochester in the same state. Then in August race riots broke out in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These were relatively small scale compared to the one that broke out in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles the following summer, after a black man was pulled over by a highway cop for reckless driving and found to be drunk as a skunk. Like the Harlem riot this one lasted almost a week. It saw 34 deaths, over a thousand injured, and some $40 million worth of property damage as almost a thousand businesses and government buildings were looted and burned. In July of 1966 there were race riots in the West Side of Chicago and the Hough section of Cleveland. The year after that saw the infamous “long, hot summer” in which over 150 race riots broke out between the months of June and August all over the United States, the worst of which was the one in Detroit, Michigan. Finally, in 1968, another string of riots broke out in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and over thirty other cities, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


These marked the end of the first wave of the race riots. There would be others periodically in the next two decades but it would not be until 1992 that anything comparable to those of the sixties took place. The previous year, Rodney King, who had been driving drunk in violation of his parole for robbery, sought to elude arrest. The result was a high speed chase which ended badly for him. A video of his capture which showed the police beating him was released – although the longer, unedited version paints rather a different picture of the events than the small clip that was repeatedly played on the media. When the police who arrested him and were charged with excessive force were acquitted in early 1992, race riots again erupted in Los Angeles. The deaths and injuries were about double those of Watts in 1966, and the property damage was at least twenty-five times greater.


What has grown into the current wave of race riots began almost a decade ago when the Black Lives Matter movement sprung up in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an incident which the media had grotesquely misrepresented in a deliberate and successful effort to stir up strife. Called activists by their sympathizers and terrorists by their detractors, Black Lives Matter appears to subscribe to a belief system in which all police brutality is directed towards blacks and black men are more likely to die at the hands of the police than in any other way, are always unarmed, never resist arrest, and are always salt of the earth pillars of their community. This belief system forms the interpretive lens through which they view any incident involving the police and a black man.


When you look at the actual data available on the subject you discover that pretty much everything progressive liberals, Hollywood celebrities, the news media, etc. take as given when it comes to race and the police in the United States is the opposite of the truth. Blacks are not killed by policemen in numbers disproportionate to their own involvement in violent crime unless by disproportionate we mean lower than we would expect, more whites are killed by American police each year than blacks and Hispanics, cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than unarmed blacks are likely to be killed by police, white cops are far more likely to kill other whites than they are to kill blacks, it is black cops who are the most likely to kill other blacks, and black people in general are far more likely to be killed by black criminals than by either whites or police of any colour and ethnicity. That these facts sound so strange to so many people is entirely due to the duplicity of the media. The newspapers and television news highlight cases of white cops killing black suspects, editorializing on them for weeks on end, while under-reporting cases that don’t fit the pattern.


It is that same media that refers to every Black Lives Matter event as a “protest” regardless of how violent it gets, similar to how the illegal blockade of the railroads earlier this year was called a “protest” even though it manifestly went beyond a peaceful demonstration.


Early last week, a black man named George Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis. A video that someone took from their phone showed him on the ground by a police car, with an officer named Derek Chauvin keeping him in this position by pressing his knee on the man’s neck for almost ten minutes. Floyd could be heard saying that he could not breathe and within an hour was dead. It is difficult to imagine any evidence coming to light that would show this not to be an excessive use of force and Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder. Yet, despite the fact that the officer responsible was quickly charged, a protest that was held in Minneapolis the day after Floyd was killed quickly degenerated into a riot, and riots rapidly spread to other cities of the United States. The number of cities where these riots have occurred or are occurring already exceeds that of the “long, hot, summer” of 1967. While David Warren is quite right when he says “there is no such thing as a spontaneous riot” these show evidence of a much higher level of organization than previous riots of the type. It is quite obvious who is doing the organizing. Despite the looting, arson, and other lawlessness typical of these sort of riots, many in the media persist in calling them “protests.”


How all of this will end is difficult to say at this point. The police are hardly in a strong position to contain these riots and the use of military force to keep the peace is being decried by the same sort of “human rights” watchdog groups who had no problem whatsoever with governments placing their entire populations under house arrest for two and a half months to stop the spread of bat flu.


There are those in this country who hold the opposite sentiments to those expressed in the first two paragraphs of this essay. There are those who think we need a “Canadianized” version of everything that happens south of the border, seemingly putting no thought into the question of whether it is good or bad in itself. There are others who would like to see Canada swallowed up by the United States entirely. One would like to think that nobody would be so foolish as to want the civilization-threatening violence south of the border to come up here, but apparently one would be mistaken in so thinking.


I was rather less than impressed, Saturday, to watch a televised report of a protest in Toronto. The protest pertained to the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet last Wednesday. Korchinski-Paquet was a 29 year old black woman, whose mother had called the police late in the afternoon. Some sort of conflict was going on and her mother asked the police to take Korchinski-Paquet to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She was subject to epileptic seizures and apparently had other mental health problems as well. She ended up falling to her death from the balcony of their apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. Her mother, in an interview that evening, accused the police of pushing her daughter off the balcony.


This was, I think, the least credible accusation of murder that I have ever heard levelled against the police. It is one thing to accuse a policeman of using too much force and beating someone to death or of being too quick to pull the trigger. These things, regrettably, happen. It is far less believable that they would push a mentally ill person they are trying to help off of a balcony.


Unfortunately, this incident took place two days after the death of George Floyd, just as the riots were heating up south of the border. Which brings us back to the protest in Toronto on Saturday, with approximately 4000 in attendance. Some wore coronavirus masks, others wore Antifa masks. There were signs demanding “justice for Regis”, signs that made reference to George Floyd, and signs with all sorts of left-wing slogans of varying degrees of inanity. There were plenty of Marxist flags and anarchist and revolutionary chants. It was just the sort of thing that could easily and quickly have degenerated into the sort of thing happening south of the border.


The next day that was exactly what did happen in Montreal. What began as a demonstration outside of police headquarters late in the afternoon turned into a violent riot in which windows were broken, shops were looted, and a barricade was set on fire.


This is precisely the sort of import from American culture that we would be better off without.


(1) The point could be argued that in the period when the Liberal Party veered to the hard left - the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - it abandoned its platform of Americanization for one of anti-Americanism. It could be counter-argued however, that this was merely a matter of appearance. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the two superpowers seemed to be each the polar opposite of the other. This was not how things looked in the period from 1933 to 1945 in which the American president was the biggest cheerleader of the Soviet Union and the latter was ruled by the most brutal despot of its entire history. It was in this period that Lester Pearson betrayed his king and country, and became a spy for the Soviet Union through the network headed and later exposed by Elizabeth Bentley. Pearson would later win a Nobel Prize for supporting the Soviet and American interest - once again united - against the French, Israeli, and, most important, British in the Suez Canal Crisis, betraying Canada's tradition of Commonwealth Loyalty and costing the government in which he was minister the next election. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1963, it was by bringing down the Diefenbaker government in a conflict over whether Washington DC should be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. Diefenbaker took the con position, Pearson the pro - see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). In Trudeau père's premiership, his most Communistic innovations were all brought in by following American precedent. His "just society" expansion of the welfare-nanny state followed the example of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", and his Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, establishing the Canadian equivalent of Soviet thought police and tribunals, was modeled on the United States' Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(2) I am using this term in its technical theological meaning, not its colloquial use.

(3) Thurgood Marshall Jr. was not appointed to the American Supreme Court until 1967, a good thirteen years later.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Obama's Legacy

The last year of the US presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is now half over and it is abundantly clear what his enduring legacy – that for which he will be remembered – will be. It will not be his disastrous attempt to give the United States a socialized health care system that has all the failings of ours up here in Canada and none of the more positive aspects. It will not even be the relentless jihad his administration has waged against traditional Christians on behalf of birth control, abortion, gay rights, and other aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution. Rather it will be a legacy of racial division and strife.

It would not have taken a great degree of prescience to have predicted as much in the fall of 2008 when Obama was first elected president. At the time media progressives in an orgy of self-congratulatory rejoicing proclaimed that the election of Obama was ushering in a new age of a new “post-racial” America, oblivious to the reality that in a republic which, for the first time its history, had chosen its president largely on the basis of his skin colour, race was obviously more important than it had ever been before. Less than a month after Obama’s first inauguration, his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. provided another clue as to the direction in which this administration would lead the United States when he berated Americans as a “nation of cowards” that has “still not come to grips with its racial past” and called for a “national conversation” on the subject of race. What Obama and Holder meant by “conversation”, of course, was not a dialogue, an interchange in which varying points of view are respectfully heard and discussed, but a monologue in which blacks voice their complaints and everyone else listens and grovels.

Then began the long stream of incidents in which the media shamelessly politicized the private suffering of black families who had lost a son to the gunfire of police or, in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case that started it all, a neighborhood watch co-ordinator, and Obama, even more shamelessly, interjected himself, and tried to make it all about him. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.” “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

This gave birth to “Black Lives Matter”, which started as a banal cliché and then grew into a radical protest movement. The movement is founded upon the idea that the United States of the present day is a white supremacist country in which black lives are devalued and the police, the agents of white supremacism, systematically target blacks with violence causing a disproportionate number of black deaths. This idea is, of course, completely contra factual, although every smug, snarky, self-assured, progressive on the planet seems to be convinced of its truth.

As was reported last year, far more whites die at the hands of the American police each year, than blacks. In Philadelphia, at least, black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot at blacks than white cops. Forty percent of cop killers in the United States are black, making blacks much more likely to kill cops than the other way around. For that matter, violent interracial crime in the United States is overwhelmingly black on white rather than vice versa. Finally, far more blacks die at the hand of other blacks each year, than at the hands of the police. If anyone devalues black lives in the United States, if anyone thinks that black lives do not matter, it is not white police officers, but other blacks.

If the people who parade under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” really believed their own slogan, they would be preaching at other blacks, rather than at white cops.

The slogan and the movement, however, have never really been about bringing down the black death count in America so much as stirring up bitterness, anger, and hatred against white people and especially against white cops. That there was an abundance of such bitterness, anger, and hatred already is quite in evidence in the statistics referred to above. To deliberately stir up more can only be regarded as an act of pure malice especially in the light of the deadly consequences that we have seen over the last couple of weeks.

On Tuesday July 5th a black man named Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the following day another black man, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in St. Paul, Minnesota. The media immediately began to fit these killings into their narrative of racist white cops killing innocent blacks – despite there being plenty of facts which do not fit that narrative (1) - while politicians like Obama and his heir designate Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to do the usual grandstanding and posturing. Then on Thursday, July 7th, at a protest over these killings organized in Dallas, Texas by Black Lives Matter, a black army veteran named Micah Xavier Johnson, having declared that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers” put this wish into action and went on a shooting spree, killing five officers and injuring about a dozen other people before holing up in a college building, where, in a bizarre sci-fi twist to the story, a police robot armed with a bomb took him out.

It did not end there, naturally. The next day similar incidents, albeit on a smaller scale, took place in Bristol, Tennessee, Valdosta, Georgia and Ballwin, Missouri. On the Saturday night after that someone began shooting at the police headquarters in San Antonio and that same weekend protests in Baton Rouge and St. Paul turned violent, with protestors in the latter attacking the police with crude projectiles and Molotov cocktails. Then, on July 17th, a man named Gavin Eugene Long, who referred to himself as a “black separatist,” shot six police officers in Baton Rouge.


At the recent Republican National Convention, David A. Clarke Jr., the Sherriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin called these events “guerilla urban warfare against the police”, which seems an apt description. Perhaps it would be more apt, however, to paraphrase the notorious remarks of the American president’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and say that “Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

At the beginning of his presidency, Obama’s administration asked for a national conversation on race, and at the end of it, what he has given America is a race war. This will be all that history will remember him for.

(1) Among other contra-narrative facts were that both men were armed, Sterling was resisting arrest, and the cop who shot Castile was not white.